Jeff Ladouceur: ‘Amen’

By Ken Johnson

June 20, 2013

ZieherSmith

516 West 20th Street, Chelsea

Through July 12

Some artists operate as powerful executives. Richard Serra, Jeff Koons and Marina Abramovic are captains of creative industry who produce works of commanding presence. Jeff Ladouceur is the antiheroic opposite of that. An exceptionally skillful draftsman and cartoonist, he draws on paper with finely pointed pencils and pens, making comical, metaphorically provocative images in which goofy avatars are absorbed into the bewildering flux of psychic experience.

Measuring 20 inches high and over 8 feet wide, the panoramic “Braided Sea (Flood Walker)” pictures terrific swirling waves on which a little guy in a monk’s robes rides a small raft at one end. Looking closely you see that the waves have big, stretchy eyes, suggesting a self merged with and carried away by its own stormy feelings.

In Mr. Ladouceur’s world the ego is always in danger of dissolution. In “Home Alone (Insider-looker)” a giant hand has reached down from the sky to lift a wooden house, exposing a soft, house-shaped volume formerly contained by the building with multiple, frightened eyes. In “Tiny Revelation (Spirit Face),” another supernatural hand pulls up the top half of a potbellied character, revealing a fiercely grinning, Gumby-like figure that was hidden within. In these and many other elaborate drawings, Mr. Ladouceur envisions consciousness expanded to include everything beyond personal identity — all that we keep at bay to maintain our distinctive selfhood. The mind has powers far exceeding those of ordinary egos.